Mohsin Hamid's 6 favorite books

Mohsin Hamid is the author of the novels Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. His fiction has been translated into over 30 languages, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, featured on bestseller lists, and adapted for the cinema. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and the Paris Review, and his essays in the Guardian, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books. Born in 1971, he has lived about half his life, on and off, in Lahore. He also spent part of his early childhood in California, attended Princeton and Harvard, and worked for a decade as a management consultant in New York and London, mostly part-time.

One of Hamid's six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

White's great children's book, which tackles the theme of the temporariness of life, showed me what literature is capable of. Beautiful, joyous, funny, and heartbreaking, it deals with the eternal cycle of people (well, mostly farm animals) passing from birth to death, and does so with wonder rather than with fear.

Read about another book on the list.

Charlotte's Web is one of Sarah Lean's top ten animal stories and a book Kate DiCamillo hopes parents will read to their kids.

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Mohsin Hamid's 10 favorite books.

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--Marshal Zeringue